Chapter 86: Who Do You Choose

Rhydor’s POV

The cut was gone, not even a ghost of it left on the skin. Just the same arm it had always been, smooth and unmarked, like Isadora’s sword had never touched it at all. My body had handled that part efficiently, and without asking for my permission, as it always did.

The rest of it, my body had left entirely alone.

I ran my thumb over the spot again without deciding to.

The tavern was the kind of place that did not ask questions. Low ceilings, warm from too many bodies and not enough windows, the smell of ale and candle smoke sitting in everything including the walls. Music came from somewhere at the back, a string instrument played by someone who was either very good or just drunk enough to sound like it. Women in low-cut and revealing dresses moved between the tables with practiced ease, laughing at things men said, refilling cups without being asked.

Nobody looked at our corner table twice.

That made sense because, I had pulled my alpha presence back and tucked it away, something I had learned to do years ago when I wanted to move through a space without the weight of what I was changing the air around me. In here I was just a man at a table with three other men and a cup I had been working through slowly for the past hour.

Torin was watching the room the way he watched every room, easy and interested, like the world was a show put on specifically for his entertainment. Silas had his elbows on the table and his jaw in his hand, thinking about something he had not said yet. Axel was drinking with the focused efficiency of someone treating it like a task to be completed.

Nobody had said anything in a while.

I ran my thumb over my arm again.

"You are going to rub a hole in it."

Axel. Flat and direct, he didn’t look up from his cup.

I said nothing.

"It is healed," he said. "It has been healed for hours. Move on."

I looked at the spot one more time. Then I picked up my cup.

"The skin healed," I said. "The rest of it." I drank. "I am not so sure."

Nobody had a quick answer for that. The music filled the space where one would have gone. A woman laughed loudly at something from across the room. Torin glanced over briefly and then looked back at the table.

Silas put his cup down.

"She had a right to be angry," he said. Not building up to it. Just saying it. "You did not just choose someone else. You un-chose a future she spent her whole life preparing for. That is a different kind of hurt."

I looked at the table.

I did not argue with it because there was nothing to argue with. Silas was right, and I had known it since this morning on the training ground when Isadora’s sword had caught my arm, and she had dropped her weapon and pressed her hands over her face, and something in me had cracked open quietly at the sight of it.

Years of knowing someone. Years of the same face across from me at meals, the same voice in the corridors, and the same presence that had always just been there. And I had stood on that training ground this morning and watched it fall apart and had nothing useful to offer her except my arms around her and three words that had not been enough.

I knew they had not been enough.

"I have years with her," I said. "I planned my future with her. And now there is Azura. I do not know how to hold one without breaking the other."

Torin looked at me from across the table.

"Can I say something honest?"

"Your honesty always pisses me off," I said.

"True." He leaned forward slightly. "If you loved Isadora the way a man is supposed to love his queen, the bond with Azura would not have been able to breathe. You would not have felt her the way you did if Isadora still held the real part of your heart." He held my gaze. "That is not me being cruel. That is just what is true."

I looked at him for a moment. Then looked away.

"I have known Isadora since we were children," I said. "I protected her. I built things with her in mind. How do I throw all of that away for someone whose feelings I am not even certain of yet?"

Silas turned his cup in a slow circle on the table. "Maybe you do not love Isadora," he said quietly. "Maybe you love what she represents. She is familiar. She is safe. She is everything you already know how to handle." He paused. "Azura is a storm. And nobody is safe in a storm. But nobody feels more alive than in the middle of one either."

The table was quiet after that.

I did not argue with it.

That was the part that sat the heaviest.

I put my cup down.

I looked at the three of them. At Torin leaning back in his chair. At Silas with his jaw set. At Axel who was already watching me with that flat patient expression that meant he had been waiting for me to get to the actual question for the past hour.

"What do I do?" I said.

All three of them looked at me.

I rarely asked that. All of them knew it. The asking itself was the thing.

"One is my choice," I said. "The other is the Goddess’s choice. If I choose Azura I am choosing someone whose full strength I cannot yet measure. If I choose Isadora I am choosing to break something inside myself that I am not sure grows back."

Axel spoke first.

"The pack follows strength," he said simply. "A miserable Alpha is a weak Alpha. A weak Alpha gets people killed." He drank. "Choose the one that makes you want to tear the world open to keep her safe. That is your answer."

Torin smiled. Not the wide performative one. Something quieter and more honest sits underneath it.

"Choose the one you cannot stop thinking about," he said. "The one who made you put your hands around your older brother’s throat."

I looked at him.

He did not look away. He was not sorry and his face made no attempt to pretend otherwise.

"The rejection did not work, I guess."

Torin said it simply. Like he was reporting the weather.

And how does he know that?

My jaw tightened.

Silas looked up slowly. Axel went still.

"You tried," Torin said. "And it failed. And you have been carrying that quietly ever since like it is something to be ashamed of instead of something to actually think about." He leaned forward. "A bond that cannot be broken by a rejection is not normal. The Goddess does not build something unbreakable and then leave it up to one man’s pride to decide what it means."

"If you do not have anything useful to say, then shut it," I said.

"I have nothing but useful things to say and you know it." He leaned back. "But fine." He raised both hands. "I am done."

He stood up.

Straightened his shirt with the easy unhurried movement of a man who had already decided the rest of his evening was going to be significantly more enjoyable than the first half of it. He looked across the tavern.

Near the back, a woman in a deep red dress was moving between the tables with the kind of ease that came from knowing exactly how you looked and being completely comfortable with it. She was laughing at something. Her hair was dark and her eyes caught the candlelight when she turned.

Torin crossed the room toward her without looking back at our table.

I watched him go.

I heard him say something. Could make out the words over the noise of the tavern. The woman tilted her head and looked him up and down with a slow assessing look, then said something back. Torin grinned.

Man whore.

I looked away and picked up my cup.

The tavern door opened.

I glanced up without meaning to.

Liona walked in. Head down, shoulders tight, moving straight through the crowd like she was trying to be invisible. She walked to the bar and ordered something. The barmaid brought it.

What is she doing here?

Then her eyes lifted. Toward the back. Toward Torin.

He was still there. Still talking to the woman. Leaning close. Saying something in her ear. The woman laughed and touched his arm.

Liona stood there holding her cup. She didn’t drink. Just watched.

The woman ran her fingers down Torin’s chest. Took his hand. They moved toward the stairs together and disappeared up to the rooms above.

Liona stared at the empty stairs for a long moment. Then she set her cup down on the bar, turned, and walked out without looking back.

The drink sat untouched.

I watched the door close behind her and something moved through my chest before I could stop it.

Azura.

Liona was her person. Her friend. Seeing Liona like that, hurting, alone, made me wonder where Azura was right now. What she was doing. If she was hurting too. If she ever thought about me the way I kept thinking about her.

I wanted to know.

I wanted to go to her because I’m going absolutely crazy.

But I didn’t move.

Silas refilled my cup without being asked.

Axel said nothing, which was its own kind of support.

I stared at the candle flame in the center of the table. A small completely unbothered thing, burning steadily in the middle of all this noise.

I thought about everything that had happened. All of it sits in my chest like a single weight I could not put down no matter how long I carried it.

Then I asked myself the only question that had actually mattered all night.

Not which one to choose. Not what was right or what was duty or what the pack required of me.

Just one question, sitting quietly and honestly at the back of my mind in the place where nothing I said out loud could reach it.

Was I already too late to choose at all?